Global Digital Marketing Agency: Managed Services for SAP IQ and Database Optimization

Our Customer is one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the world. With more than 15,000 employees in over seventy markets, the company provides tailored solutions to clients worldwide, including globally recognized financial services, luxury, telecommunications, oil, and consumer packaged goods brands, as well as multi-billion-dollar government agencies.

The Customer was facing ongoing database performance issues due to their growing client list. mLogica was brought in to replace the existing managed services support for their SAP IQ database environment and to optimize its operations.

The existing database, in heavy use by thousands of users, had serious performance issues, including high latency, which were exacerbated by the speed at which incoming data was growing. The environment was unable to meet increasing operational demands and was also creating significant cost inefficiencies.

As a consequence the agency faced frustrating performance lags and downtimes that resulted in substantial financial and reputational damage. Attempts by support teams to overcome these issues via traditional manual tuning and optimization were time-consuming, prone to human error and ultimately ineffective

mLogica collaborated with the Customer to identify and address these issues, using our GenAI-powered TRAK*M Managed Services Platform to:

• Automate operations: TRAK*M streamlines daily database tasks while ensuring smooth operation and efficient use of resources
• Drive performance: TRAK*M optimizes database tuning, indexing, query execution and memory allocation to enable maximum output
• Enhanced issue resolution: TRAK*M’s GenAI-powered methodology identifies, triages, tracks and resolves issues with full user visibility

Over the initial six-month work period, mLogica’s managed services (MS) team worked directly with the Customer to review the entire existing SAP IQ environment and provide key recommendations to improve performance. These included restructuring the database, application enhancement and incorporating indexes and query plans. The MS team also established a 24/7 help desk team to monitor the environment and help identify, prioritize and resolve issues based on criticality levels. We also developed a technical operations manual (TOM) that detailed the entire database environment, including SLAs and SOPs.

mLogica partnered with the Customer’s team to conduct an in-depth assessment, health check and discovery process of the SAP IQ environment over the course of two weeks. This allowed us to determine the full scope of existing issues, as well as the most effective ways to optimize the system for future business needs. Based on this analysis, our team shared key recommendations with the Customer, including:

• Database restructuring
• Strategic indexing
• Optimized query plans
• Application enhancements

During the implementation phase, mLogica's team tackled several challenges:

Server Bottlenecks: The high number of active and inactive user connections, along with the increased volume of table creation resulted in server bottlenecks that caused high latency. mLogica proactively identified, addressed and resolved these underlying issues.

Performance Optimization: After analysis by the mLogica team, the root causes of the many user-reported performance issues were determined to be:

• Improper index selection
• Misconfiguration
• Inefficient queries
• Sub-optimal TempDB utilization

Our team applied systematic issue resolution of root causes, triaging issues based on their severity to significantly enhance database performance.

Gen AI deployment: Using TRAK*M’s GenAI capabilities, the mLogica team analyzed available system data to identify architecture deficiencies and key critical issues, which we then resolved. By determining query execution time, resource utilization and throughput to benchmark performance baselines and analyze architecture gaps, mLogica was able to recommend detailed changes that remediated these deficiencies, stabilizing the environment going forward.

SAP IQ Upgrade: Due to the underlying complexities in the Customer’s existing SAP IQ v.15.4 database system, one of the most challenging tasks our team faced was the upgrade to the v.16.1 environment. Our team collaborated with SAP technical support to resolve all issues and seamlessly execute the SAP IQ upgrade.

Addressing user actions that impacted database performance: mLogica’s managed services team also isolated, identified and suggested remediations to eliminate user and administrator errors that were causing server overload and slow response times, including:

• Excessive user connections at peak times
• Users not logging off when done, therefore appearing “active”
• Creation and alteration of hundreds of tables, unnecessarily consuming server resources and causing performance issues that impacted all database processes

Key benefits enjoyed by the Customer as a result of the deployment of our TRAK*M Managed Services Platform include:

Enhanced Performance: By applying comprehensive optimization protocols, our team was able to remediate the existing issues, resolve the serious latency problems and ensure fast, efficient database performance going forward.

Cost Reduction: Leveraging TRAK*M to automate day-to-day administrative tasks helped the organization minimize manual work and decrease overall costs associated with labor-intensive database operation, support and maintenance activities.

Improved Efficiencies: The automation of routine processes also liberated the company’s internal IT team from complex, time-consuming database management, allowing them to spend their time on innovation and business-building activities.

Increased Reliability: The technical operations manual (TOM) created by our team established standardized procedures for daily database administration, optimization and tuning tasks, ensuring reliable, consistent operation and maintenance of the environment and driving optimal performance.

Proactive Issue Resolution: With the implementation of TRAK*M’s GenAI-powered defect management process, database issues are systematically detected, triaged and remediated to ensure seamless operations.

mLogica’s TRAK*M Managed Services Platform allows our team to perform ongoing database administration and optimization, including:

Performance Optimization: TRAK*M plays a key role in benchmarking database performance parameters by optimizing resources, improving query performance and setting indexing strategies.

Automation of Routine Functions: Previously, database management tasks such as monitoring, maintenance and issue resolution required continuous involvement of the Customer’s IT team. TRAK*M enables the Customer to automate repetitive functions, freeing staff from time-consuming recurring maintenance activities.

Round-the-Clock Support: mLogica’s help desk team provides 24/7 issue resolution support to identify and resolve defects that previously impacted database performance.

Continuous Performance Monitoring: mLogica’s managed services team applied SAP’s sp_iqsysmon procedures and customer scripts to address and remediate critical performance issues.

Technical Operations Manual (TOM): The comprehensive TOM document developed by our team incorporates complete database environment details, SOPs and SLAs, providing users with technical information and guidelines for error-free database functioning.

Thus, mLogica’s GenAI-powered database management and monitoring platform, TRAK*M, with the support of our expert team of database administrators, has delivered an updated, efficient and flexible database environment, ensuring continuous service delivery to both employee and client users.